


demons will drown

by Blake



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Alternate Universe - 19th Century, F/F, Historical AU, Period-Typical Sexism, gender essentialism, mermaid fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 19:35:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23152600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Blake/pseuds/Blake
Summary: Sometimes, you catch her looking out over the railing, staring into the sea. You wonder what she’s looking at and what she’s thinking. Does she miss it? Does she long for the bite of salt and cold? Or does she remember that life not at all? Does she watch the waves, searching for answers no one can provide about what happened to her, and where all those years of her life went?
Relationships: Kathryn Janeway/Seven of Nine
Comments: 25
Kudos: 48





	demons will drown

**Author's Note:**

> This just came out of me today, so here it is!

Sometimes, you catch her looking out over the railing, staring into the sea. You wonder what she’s looking at and what she’s thinking. Does she miss it? Does she long for the bite of salt and cold? Or does she remember that life not at all? Does she watch the waves, searching for answers no one can provide about what happened to her, and where all those years of her life went?

Each time you ask, she straightens her spine until she towers over you. Her eyes pierce you with salt and cold. Her long, blond hair whips out at you in the wind like nests of kelp jealously guarding a secret treasure. You learn to stop asking.

~~

The first thing you taught her was how to breathe. Pale as ice in your arms, cold-bristled flesh as rough as the volcanic rock of the island you dragged her onto. Her breaths came out choked and frantic, like a trapped wave thrashing around a tide pool, trying to escape, more like sobbing than anything you’d heard in a long time.

She let you place her hand on your chest. You inhaled deep and exhaled slow. You let her feel the rise and fall, the sopping wet of your cotton shirt and the thicker band of your binding. You let her feel your heartbeat, because you wanted her to breathe.

With her head in your lap, her eyes reflected the white sky, and were just as wide. You saw fear, and you wanted to soothe. You saw fear, and you had the thought that she might be able to return to the sea, if you just let the tide take her back. She might still be able to go back, if she didn’t learn to breathe. You saw fear, and you wanted her to breathe.

You placed her other limp hand on her own heaving, trembling sternum. Only then, when she felt the difference, did she learn to fill her lungs with air and let it push back out.

~~

Her legs are still too weak for her to stand at the helm, but she knows the stars better than science or man can fathom. Your men didn’t trust her at first—and perhaps you didn’t, either, but you’ve always liked to seem the type of captain who places bold bets—but she proved her navigation skill time and time again.

“You see the sea and the stars as separate,” she tells you one day. You know she is talking to you, even though the helmsman is there beside you both.

“Yes,” you say, because you have made a long career of using one to guide you across the other. You have books of poetry in your cabin about the gods of the heavens and the monsters of the seas, the guiding light and the fickle lover that must be conquered.

The moon shines in her eyes as she looks out across the deck. “From the bottom of the ocean, they are the same.”

~~

You taught her how to talk. Her full lips and tightly clenched jaw made you think she must have some experience, but all she could show you were hand gestures. You pointed to yourself and said, “Janeway,” enough times that she started to move her lips silently in some semblance of the right shapes. Then you pointed to her, and the shape her hands made looked like what you would do if you were counting to seven on your fingers. “Seven,” you called her, reaching out slowly to brush your knuckles across the wisps of salt-encrusted hair on her forehead, because the slower you move, the less likely she is to jerk away.

You taught her to speak like you taught her to breathe, but with her hands on your throats instead of your chests.

~~

You’re already three months late for your shipment, but you’ve started measuring time by the changing color of the light on Seven’s skin. You still don’t know exactly where you found her, because that storm knocked you off course somewhere off of Cape Horn, but her complexion matched the icebergs and the blue of her eyes was glacial and her hair was fair like something the sun had never touched.

Now, as you sail further north, her hair draws in sunlight like Indiana fields of wheat.

You teach her to brush it. There’s no one else on board to do it, anyways. You keep her in your cabin, because you wouldn’t trust her in anyone else’s. You want to protect her from knowing what might happen to her anywhere else. You also suspect she might murder a member of your crew if they tried anything, and you can’t afford to lose any more men after the storm.

You know what the men say about you keeping her. Whether they know you’re a woman, don’t know, or don’t care, (and you only recruit men if you’re sure they’re in one of those three categories,) they still have their suspicions about what you get up to, you’re sure of it. They talked when you brought Torres on board, and you didn’t even have to keep her in your cabin.

You brush her hair, trapping it between the bristles and your free palm and sliding down the length of it to the tip. You watch in the mirror as her eyes slide shut, the way they do when she is lost in thought. You have never seen her truly relaxed. “You were a little girl, once,” you whisper, though the image in your mind is of a cold-blooded stare and vicious bared teeth when she tried to kill you, before she changed.

She still doesn’t believe you fully. It takes faith to believe that a monster was once a human, and that it can become human again. “A little girl is just a creature like any other.”

The way Seven uses logic to devalue human life chills you to the bone. The way she erases her own individuality makes your stomach twist in some kind of jealousy, or injustice. _I saved you from that_ , you think, brushing out a tangle in her hair, remembering the black, empty pupils of the lost creature that tried to sink your ship.

She’s a quick study, and doesn’t need you to show her more than once how to brush her hair.

~~

Teaching her to walk took days and days. Her legs were like sodden twigs, too thin and weak to bear weight. Her strong arms clutched at the walls and at your shoulders, then at the floor as she tried to crawl back to the ocean. She opened her mouth and screamed without sound. She wrapped her hands around your throat and squeezed like an infant grabbing for something without knowing what it is. You didn’t pull your dagger on her, because you had faith she wouldn’t kill you.

There was a violence to her sense of dignity. It snapped her bones into alignment, tightened every muscle, muted every attempted scream as quickly as though she had been struck by a whip.

She learned to walk because that dignity kept her spine straight. You were teaching her to walk, so it didn’t make sense that you wanted her to lean on you once again, wanted to hear the rage that would come from her throat when her frustration finally found its voice.

~~

Near the equator, her hair flames like gold and her skin starts to redden and deepen from all her hours standing beside the helm.

“Will your master be angry that our shipment is so late?” she asks, attempting to make use of her study of the ways of the ship. The amount of things she can learn in one afternoon of conversation with the helmsman continues to astound you.

You smile to yourself, unreasonably proud of her even though she has technically offended you. “Oh, I have no master.” She looks over at you curiously. She can’t make sense of your society, your economy, your governments, but her blind guesses are endearing. “And no, no one will be too upset. A few gold miners can go a little hungry for a week or two and the world won’t stop.”

“It is strange,” she says, shifting to look straight ahead at the horizon, hands folding proudly behind her back, “to bring goods from one place to another. A strong society can feed itself.”

“Oh?” You feel yourself lashing out, because she’s turned away from you and to the sea, and because she’s claiming to be superior in logic, but most of all because she’s alluding to her previous life in a way that makes you think she remembers a great deal more than she will talk to you about. You want to startle her into talking to you about everything. You want her to remember her previous life so that you can hear her renounce it. “By murdering the crew of any ship that happens to sail through its territory?”

She turns to look down the slope of her nose at you, spine still straighter than that of any navy sailor. She flusters like a wave scattering under the bow of a ship, proud and unbreakable, but observably changed. A flush of pink dapples her throat, disappearing under the collar of her borrowed shirt. You know what her body looks like. You have seen it a dozen times, but you want to see it again and again. You want to see how each day changes it. You want to see how you’ve changed it, how you change it. You want to see how strong the muscles of her legs have gotten, and how far the flush on her neck goes.

You don’t want her the same way you have wanted other women.

~~

One of the very first things you explained to her once she learned some of your language was your unique position. You were a woman living as a man because of the opportunities it afforded you, but you weren’t a man. No one was allowed to know what Seven had seen of you, just as they weren’t allowed to know where Seven had come from.

She and you had to keep one another’s secrets, or the world would call you both monsters, instead of simply humans.

~~

As you get closer to San Francisco, you feel as though you’re starting to run out of time. Your men grow restless and your cargo starts to rot in the equatorial heat, but you want Seven to know more about being human before she goes ashore and leaves you forever.

So you teach her to read poetry, which is more than any of your crew can boast. You teach her how to use money. You teach her things you barely remember from when you were a little girl.

You have your first mate teach her how to dance. You put on a smile while everyone sits down for a minute to watch and laugh, everyone invested in how many times their little shipwreck girl with memory loss would step on their first mate’s feet.

But she hardly steps on him at all. She moves with grace, though it barely seems like she’s dancing with anyone but the breeze.

You watch him steal a sniff from her hair, and your gut churns with jealousy. Seven’s best bet is to quickly find a husband in San Francisco who will care for her like a child, which is how, in your experience, most men seem to treat their wives. But you hate to imagine it. You hate to imagine the scent of her hair anywhere but your own bunk. You hate to imagine this vibrant, strong, beautiful, unique woman trapped in yet another form of bondage, after so recently being freed from the sea.

~~

“I just want to get off this fucking ship,” Seven once said, after learning some new vocabulary. Her head was laid on your chest. You wondered if she was acting out of some instinct of seeking motherly affection. You knew you were not acting out of motherly instinct. Your desire to protect her and see her happy seemed too all-consuming to be motherly.

“I’ll happily watch you stumble through your first steps on land,” you promised.

~~

A gray blanket of fog sheaths the entrance to the bay, and you are soon all breathing in moisture. Seven looks as pale as she did in the Antarctic. She says nothing as the docks come into view.

A ray of sunlight breaks through the sky when Seven turns to you with wild eyes and asks to stay on board and join your crew. Joy and relief burst in your throat like laughter and you think the sea and the sky might just be one and the same after all, if you’re looking into the eyes of the right girl.

~~

The way back south goes too easy. You lose track of time, distracted by the happiness of seeing Seven grow strong under the weight of the helm, her palms growing callused.

She tells you she doesn’t have distinct memories of her life before. Just _hunger, feeding, efficiency, the herd, the Queen, fear, safety, and more hunger._

“The Queen?” you ask.

She traces her blistered finger across the map you’re showing her. Absent-mindedly, she explains, “The one who protects you and provides for you and gives you purpose. The one you feed and care for above all else. So this is the Atlantic Ocean? Why do they all have different names if they have no border?”

You’re filled with unreasonable hate for this queen, for giving Seven some sense of belonging that made her feel beholden but never made her feel special. “Because names reflect the meaning things have to people, Seven.”

She looks at you like she can see too much of you. Sometimes, you hope she will see how much you love her, so that she can put you out of your misery. “So the names are about the people who sail them, not the oceans themselves.”

You can’t think of a good answer to that, so you teach her about the North Sea instead.

~~

The temperature drops as you cross from the dead of summer into the dead of winter. The brine in the air sets your nerves on edge. It takes you too long to realize that your body is sensing the approach of the Horn and all the events that occurred there not four months ago. The hairs on your arms raise and stay there, anticipating a storm that might take your ship off course and into a sea of monsters trying to eat your flesh.

You catch her looking out over the railing at the endless ocean to the West, and it’s only then that you think she must obviously be sensing your approach as well. Does it itch like a scar? Does it ache like homesickness? You want to know, but her answer might gut you. It might break your faith.

You can see the white of your breath, even in the safety of your cabin. “Are you cold?” you ask her. She is sitting on the chair she sleeps on, wrapped in a blanket and shivering. You ask her because you want to know if she is able to recognize her own body’s sensations now. She is far too good at ignoring her needs.

“I am cold,” she answers through chattering teeth.

You bid her come into your bed, expecting her to come reluctantly and closed off.

But she’s never been anything if not surprising.

She curls up on your side, head over your heart, and perhaps she feels it speeding, because she reaches out to touch. She puts her hand all over you, feeling the shape of your chest over your shirt, and then reaching underneath to warm her cool fingers against the skin of your belly. She might as well be splitting you open at the center seam, for how useless and hot your lower half gets, like gushing blood. Her leg drags over yours, thigh pressing into where you’re hottest, and maybe it’s all for warmth, but she’s exhaling deep, humid breaths against your throat, so the exchange is mutual.

She touches, and you let her touch. “I want,” she says, heaving herself more on top of you, your hips aligned, her throat long and tantalizing above your mouth.

“You want what, Seven?”

She never answers. She touches, and you let her touch.

~~

In the grey fog of morning, like regrets after a night of too-heavy drinking, you remember the myths about mermaids and sirens seducing captains and drawing their ships to crash into rocky shoals. You cross your arms to thumb across your sore breast. You breathe in and smell your own sweat, which she buried her face in before laying her cheek across yours. All these places that her mouth has been, and you haven’t even kissed her, haven’t even tasted her. You might crash _Voyager_ into the shoals if she asked you to kiss her.

You watch her warily as your ship navigates the mist-blinded sea past her former home. You look for the slightest indication that she feels anything about seeing it, or the slightest indication that she thinks anything of how she touched you last night.

“I can hear them.” Her voice quakes when she murmurs this to you in the dead air hovering over the helm. Your heart ricochets between relief that she’s being honest and despair that she’s going to leave you.

“What are they saying?” You’re afraid of the answer but you ask anyway.

She shakes her head. She ties her hair back now with a strip of leather. You want to feel the whip of her loose hair again, just in the palm of your hand. “I don’t understand it anymore.”

It feels like victory to you, but she doesn’t seem as certain as you feel. Her brow furrows, and she scans the waters, lost without the stars.

~~

They attack at night.

They rock the ship side to side until they can reach over the railing and take men down with them. But not if Seven reaches them first. You watch her gut several of them with the dagger you gave her, like fish for the soup pot. You watch her sturdy legs hold her fast against the swaying of the ship. You watch her scream with no voice as she carves the monsters up.

You worry that by the same strange, unknown magic that connected you to her and split her tail into two legs and gave her the will to breathe, her contact with these monsters will take her back from you.

The rest of your men fight back, and though they’re much less effective, the creatures eventually swim away, tails shining under the surface of the water, in the new shards of moonlight peering down through the clouds, the sea and the sky as one.

Seven is soaked through with brine, her arms shining with clear, sticky liquid. She stands still, looking at you without recognition. Then you’re lunging after her as she leaps over the railing and into the ocean.

Your heart stops in your chest. Someone else cries for the man overboard. Your voice is stuck in your throat.

~~

She comes back just five minutes later, heaving herself onto the deck from the side opposite from the one she jumped from.

“She was just rinsing off,” you announce to anyone. If you say something confidently enough, you can make yourself believe you never worried that she was never coming back.

Someone is draping a blanket over her shoulders. A crowd is gathering around her, cheering and excited, either about her dramatic return or the fact that she’s surprisingly good at slaughtering mermaids.

“They were here for me,” she keeps saying, looking dully at the deck. You come closer, because nobody is listening to her, and all you want to do is listen to her. “They were here for me.”

“Let’s get you dried off.” You shoo away the men, tell them to get back to work. You walk her back to your cabin. It feels like a hundred years ago that you first propped her up on your shoulder and guided her through this door.

“I want to cut it all out of me. I want it _gone_. I want to have never been such a vile, mindless, filthy—”

“Sssh.” You seat her on your bed and silence her with your finger to her lips. You feel a sob growing under your ribcage, something like relief but also sorrow for all of Seven’s pain. She doesn’t _understand_ half of how beautiful she is.

You tilt her head up between your palms, which greedily feel for the wet, slat-grainy chunks of her hair. “I love you,” you confess. It doesn’t have to mean anything she doesn’t want it to mean, but you meant it with all of your being. “I love you _because_ of how strong you are, that you can survive the tug and pull of two cruel worlds and still stand with your back so straight, and because you could be anyone you want to be, and you’re here, now, on my ship, better than half my crew put together, and more beautiful than anything I’ve ever—”

You make yourself stop. Her gaze has focused, brought out of the fog of her self-loathing and into the embarrassing brightness of your honesty. You don’t realize you’re crying until she reaches up to touch a tear with her calloused finger.

“I want—” she whispers.

Your response comes out sounding wet with tears. “You want what?” You squeeze her jaws, ears, and skull with your hands, wanting so much more.

“I want to kiss you,” she says. The word _kiss_ comes out twisted and foreign-sounding, like a word she’d only read in your poetry books.

Your next breath is full of laughter. You can’t help it. You’re cold, wet, exhausted, and the girl you’ve been falling in love with for months is telling you she wants to kiss you.

Her kiss tastes like the blood of her chapped, broken lips.

~~

You love the way she mouths silent screams when you touch her. You love the way her hands make foreign shapes in the tangles of your hair. You love the way the golden hair under her arms glistens like threads of sunlight on the choppy surface of the waves. You love the way her breath tastes like earth. You love the way she wriggles like her hips are bound when you spread her legs apart and set yourself between them, prying her open. You love the way she tastes like salt.

~~

Maybe you’ll buy her a seaside cottage. Somewhere you can be old maids together, where you can grow your own food and escape the ugly touch of the human world. Somewhere you can watch her as she looks out at the sea, and you can wonder what she’s thinking about. Some grey place where the sea and sky are one.


End file.
